What killed pottage?

[mindstalk]

In history, we find pottage, a one pot meal of grains, legumes, vegetables, etc. Probably the "stew" of Extruded Fantasy Product. Supposedly a staple for centuries of European history, if not elsewhere. Now nearly extinct, as a name if not actual meal.

It's not like we don't throw things together and boil them; there's lots of those, whether or not we call them "stew". Drawing on my parents' repertoire, there's beef stew, tomato meat sauce (two varieties), beef stroganoff, chicken coq au vin, among others; there's also various Thai curries, or Ethiopian dishes, among yet more. But what they usually don't have is cereal cooked in the dish (though potatoes might be); instead, the stew is served over or beside separately cooked pasta or rice, or with bread.

So, why? I guess the obvious answer is that we can separate them easily. We have multiple gas or electric burners (or rice cookers). We have cheap factory-made pasta, or cheap rice, or cheap bread from the grocery store. So we can cook cereals without cooking whole grains for an hour, or grinding and baking flour, or paying a miller and baker (and waiting for the baking). Very different from having a bushel of wheatberries (or rye, or barley), and maybe one hearth.

And I suppose that given the choice, most people prefer the texture or contrast of a freshly cooked grain product with the dish, rather than one large mash. I've been making my own pottages recently though, and I like it.

A different reason is that there's only so much pot and freezer capacity. Back in 2020 I experimented with "pasta cooked in meat sauce", and realized that it worked[1] for me then because I had access to a large Dutch oven, and was still willing to eat my way through it all quickly. But with my traditional smaller saucepans, the pot was full of tomatoes and beef and such; putting in pasta, which was cheap and quick to cook anyway, would have been a waste of pot volume. And of freezer space (my father would cook a large batch of sauce, then freeze a lot.)

I also wondered if we've simply changed the name, e.g. to "one pot meal". However, when I searched, most of the recipes for those were "one pot" (and maybe a skillet) for the main dish, then still served over cereal product. Though this enchilada pasta is an exception, with pasta and canned beans all cooked together; pretty quickly, since it is just pasta and canned beans, not the brown rice and lentils combos I've been making.

[1] Well, fusilli/rotini worked. Macaroni/elbows probably would too. Spaghetti turned into giant clumps of pasta, blech.

Comments

[redbird]

We sometimes make beef barley soup that's thick enough to count here, I think: meat, onions and maybe other veg, and the barley.

[mindstalk]

Good example! Can't remember if my parents made that.

[anna_wing]

Risotto?

In my youth, I would make a quick dinner for one, of rice cooked in a saucepan or microwave, with lentils, chopped up onion, vegetables added as the rice cooks. Flavoured with soya sauce, sesame oil, five-spice powder etc to taste.

[mindstalk]

Interesting! Risotto is almost completely outside my experience.

Though wikipedia says "Risotto, unlike other rice dishes, requires constant care and attention" and "It must be eaten at once, as it continues to cook in its own heat, making the grains absorb all the liquid and become soft and dry.", which seem the opposite of a simple and robust or even "gets better overnight" of a stew or pottage.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I find the closest modern analogs of pottage to be:

* skillet meals in which the base is a grain or grain medley (e.g. barley or couscous) plus vegetables, meat or vegan protein, and seasonings or sauce

* crockpot meals that use a grain as a thickener (e.g. beef and barley stew)

* any savory oatmeal (or similar) where you cook everything together instead of making plain oatmeal and covering it with toppings

* "garden medley" or "shut up and eat it" recipes designed to use whatever is available at the moment (e.g. whatever veggie pilau or even stir-fry anything noodles)

* some casseroles (e.g. beans and rice)

* many curries are "bunch of stuff cooked together" (e.g. lentil curry)


I do tend to think of pottage as a boiled or simmered dish, hence listing skillet and crockpot first -- basically porridge with stuff in it -- but if you go by ingredient medleys then there are more options. Probably every newly-fledged adult has at some time resorted to "throw everything in a pot and heat until done."

But the only people I commonly hear calling it "pottage" nowadays are history buffs and historic reenactment fans.

Re: Thoughts

[mindstalk]

Thanks for the links!

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

You're welcome! I like sharing recipes.

If you like food history, check out:
https://nbmpub.com/products/the-incredible-story-of-cooking

Re: Thoughts

[elusiveat]

Good list. I do think that in terms of cooking infrastructure required, there are important differences between baking and boiling.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well, there can be, but they overlap surprisingly much.

Did you know that you can make typically baked things, such as quickbreads or quiche, inside a crockpot? I was kind of bemused the first time I saw a recipe for that kind of thing, and not sure how well it would work, so we wanted to try it. Yep, it works; if we want a crustless quiche, that's how we make it.

Conversely, if you stick a pan of wet stuff in the oven to bake, the liquid in it comes to a boil, and some casseroles are supposed to stay fairly wet. So there's a range of things like ratatouille that can be baked but come out with the same general features as pottage.

I tend to think of pottage as a middle-consistency dish: not dry like a kugel, not liquid like a soup, but having a consistency like oatmeal or curry.

We generally think of it as a pot-over-fire dish because it predates ovens being common, but once you have the ability to put a lid over a pot -- or anything that serves the same purpose as a fitted lid, such as a flat rock -- then you can merge the bake/boil methods. It's easier with a purpose-made pot with a lipped lid, but possible without.

I would bet that pottage was approximately the third recipe Homo invented, after "stick it over a fire until hot" and "stick in coals until hot" (two different types of roasting) with seasonings applied. You start getting annoyed that the tasty bits keep falling off, so you look for a way to contain them. That quickly leads to dumping a bunch of stuff into either a hollow of a rock or a hide full of water, then poking it with hot rocks until soft. Archaeologists have found evidence of Neanderthals cooking mixtures of plants (e.g. grains and vegetables) so I would expect that to come out like pottage.

Re: Thoughts

[mindstalk]

My family's oven broke and never got fixed or replaced, so my father got good at using a Dutch oven. I don't recall him ever "baking" something outright, but it would make roast beef, or get filled with pan-seared fried chicken to finish roasting, all on the gas burner.

having a consistency like oatmeal or curry.

Also depends how much liquid you commit to it, of course. Some of my pottage attempts end up fairly dry, as the ingredients absorb all the liquid. Recently I've been committing to adding more, both for easier consumption after oral surgery and because it seems more filling (and weight-losing) when it's coming with a lot of liquid.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> My family's oven broke and never got fixed or replaced, so my father got good at using a Dutch oven. I don't recall him ever "baking" something outright, but it would make roast beef, or get filled with pan-seared fried chicken to finish roasting, all on the gas burner.<<

Yeah, a Dutch oven works.

>> Also depends how much liquid you commit to it, of course. Some of my pottage attempts end up fairly dry, as the ingredients absorb all the liquid.<<

Okay, it's like making dough. You have your wet ingredients and your dry ingredients. Fresh fruits, vegetables, etc. are wet ingredients because they will release liquid as they cook. Milk, broth, water, and other liquids are also wet. Most purees such as applesauce or gravy will also be wet. Oddly enough so is sugar, because of how it melts. Then things like grain or flour are dry. So are legumes and dried fruits or vegetables, because they absorb liquid as they cook.

You want your wet and dry ingredients to balance out, creating a moderate texture. If it's routinely coming out drier than you want, you can:

* Add more liquid at the beginning. But then you have to make sure it doesn't boil over.

* Check periodically and add extra liquid if it starts to dry out too much, like you would in a crockpot.

* Presoak dry ingredients like grains so they don't absorb as much while cooking.

* Cook with a lid, like a crockpot, to slow the loss of moisture through evaporation.

[beatrice_otter]

What killed pottage? Stoves that get turned on and off. And the universality of milled flour and ovens.

The thing about cooking up until extremely recently, in Europe at least, was that for most of the year you would have the fire burning all the time. Because it was also your main source of heat! If it's hot ANYWAY, you might as well have something going; those grains take a long time to process, and it's cheaper to put the whole grain in a pot with some other stuff than it is to have it milled into grain. It doesn't matter how long it takes to cook the grain that way, because you're not standing there Cooking It the whole time, you just stir occasionally as you happen to be walking past. It is the simplest, easiest, and cheapest way of converting the grain you have harvested into something edible. Also, even if you did have your grain milled, that didn't mean you could bake with it; ovens were rare because they were a fire hazard. In most places, only bakers had them. So if you did have the grain turned into flour, it would be "sell the grain to the miller, buy bread from the baker." Again, that is extra hassle and expense. Pottage skips those steps.

In the modern world, we're not growing our own grain and then choosing whether to cook it as-is or send it out to be milled; we're buying it in the store, and it's not notably cheaper to get it un-milled than as flour ... or as pasta! And when we cook it, we have a stove that we turn on specifically to cook with (and expect to spend the time actively cooking), and we also have our own ovens.

Basically, the practicalities of producing food, preparing it, and then cooking it are very different, and pottage is no longer the easiest and cheapest thing to do with our staple grains.

[mindstalk]

Yeah, pretty similar ideas.

Heck, it's a bit tricky to even find whole brains other than rice or oats or barley... okay, maybe not that tricky, and I could probably find rye or wheat at my local foofy store, but I don't know about the supermarket.

There's also the pancake/flatbread method of cooking flour, but still an extra step.

OTOH while pottage isn't the clear winner it once was, it seems still cheap and easy enough that it seems a bit odd that it's been entirely eclipsed, rather than being one of many options. There's lots and lots of "we cooked X and serve it over rice or pasta", not so much "we cooked brown rice or barley in with X".

[beatrice_otter]

Industrialization might also be a factor. Poor people left their homes and lived in cities to work in factories, mostly in boarding houses where they were not doing any cooking. They either ate the food the landlady cooked which was part of their rent, or bought street food and the like. So they weren't connected to their old food ways back in their home village. They weren't learning to cook there and then passing it on to their children. And it's cheaper and easier to make bread at industrial scale than pottage, so they mostly ate bread and potatoes with a little bit of meat when they could get it. And pottage was a food that poor farmers ate. If you had money you were eating fancier things ... and the people with money were more likely to be left in the old village.

[zdenka]

Well, there's cholent.

[mindstalk]

Oh yeah! Cholent and hamin do seem pretty much like pottage.

[hhimring]

I may well be wrong, but I have tended to think of pottage as often containing relatively more grain and less meat than stew, etc. typically does now. Perhaps only for reasons of affordability: some ingredients are so much cheaper (relatively) than they used to be.